Autobiographical Game
Description
I love traveling, and food is always the first thing I consider when planning for one. Through this game, I wanted to introduce some places I really enjoyed!
Design Process
Proposal
Will be updated (Character, Storyboard) When I got this assignment, I wanted to create a fun, playful game. So I decided to go with the topic that makes me happy, which is travel. But travel itself was to vague, so I narrowed it down to the food that I ate during my trips. I first listed the countries that I went to with the food I remember liking, and chose Japan and Thailand as the mini game theme. I then drew a very rough sketch of my game scenes. My game basically needed the following:
- Intro: Choose Game
- Mini Game x2: Japan and Thailand
- Success Page: Try another game
- Fail Page: Retry or try another game
Gray Boxing
This took the most time doing. For the game, I needed keep track of how many times the user won a game, allow them to restart the game, and refresh the game so all the counts(time, points etc) went back to the original values. The most difficult part for me during this part was the reseting. When I playtested the gray box, I was not able to finish the game as I planned it because the values did not reset. So I made it reset by adding the reset code to every scene jump at the end of the game.
Designing
After I did the gray boxing, I sketched the character that the user would be moving. Then I designed how the scenes would look like. As I designed the scenes, I realized I needed the instructions for the games since each game uses different keys, Japan game uses the arrow key and Thailand game uses mouse click.
Reflection
Since I had to think about coding, design, and the entire story of the game, it was a tough assignment compared to the previous ones. However, I think this project made me think about UX, which was not the thing that I considered with the past works. I considered how the users would react to the scene switches and checked they did not get lost between them. It was my first time making a game, so I think there may be some places where I can make the UX better. From now on, I will try to think of how I can make the UX better with the assignments.
Credits
Airplane & Pacman game Frogger by Xin Xin
Pacman game Fruit Escape by tespin
Game Timer Countdown Timer by marynotari
Game Music Itty Bitty 8 Bit by Kevin MacLeod
Game Sound Effect Cartoon Touch 8bit Sound Effects by DayDreamSound